He paused, then more quietly stated, “As you are to me.”

The clock ticked; their gazes remained locked. Neither moved.

Then he stirred. “I’ve done all I can to explain, to make you understand.”

His expression closed; he turned to the door.

Leonora tried to rise. Couldn’t. “Where are you going?”

Hand on the knob, he looked back at her. “I’m leaving. I’ll send your maid to you.” His words were clipped, but emotion, suppressed, seethed beneath them. “When you can cope with being important to someone, you know where to find me.”

“Tristan…” With an effort, she swiveled, lifted her hand—

The door shut. Clicked with a finality that echoed through the room.

She stared at the door for a long moment, then sighed and sank back on the chaise. Closed her eyes. She comprehended perfectly what she’d done. Knew she would have to undo it.

But not now. Not today.

She was too weak even to think, and she would need to think, to plan, to work out exactly what to say to soothe her wounded wolf.

The next three days turned into a parade of apologies.

Forgiving Harriet was easy enough. The poor soul had been so overset on seeing Leonora lying senseless on the kitchen flags, she’d babbled hysterically about men attacking her; one minor comment had been enough to attract Tristan’s attention. He’d ruthlessly extracted all the details from Harriet, and left her in an even more emotionally wrought state.

When Leonora retired to her bed after consuming a bowl of soup for luncheon—all she could imagine keeping down—Harriet helped her up the stairs and into her room without a word, without once looking up or meeting her eye.

Inwardly sighing, Leonora sat on her bed, then encouraged Harriet to pour out her guilt, her worries and concerns, then made peace with her.

That proved the easiest fence to mend.

Drained, still physically shaken, she remained in her room for the rest of the day. Her aunts called, but after one look at her face, kept their visit brief. At her insistence, they agreed to avoid all mention of the attack; to all who asked after her, she would be simply indisposed.

The next morning, Harriet had just removed her breakfast tray and left her sitting in an armchair before the fire, when a tap sounded on her door. She called, “Come in.”

The door opened; Jeremy looked around it.

He spotted her. “Are you well enough to talk?”

“Yes, of course.” She waved him in.

He came slowly, carefully shutting the door behind him, then walking quietly across to stand by the mantelpiece and look down at her. His gaze fastened on the bandage still circling her head. A spasm contorted his features. “It’s my fault you got hurt. I should have listened—paid more attention. I knew it wasn’t your imagination, what you said about the burglars, but it was so much easier to simply ignore it all—”

He was twenty-four, but suddenly he was, once again, her little brother. She let him talk, let him say what he needed to. Let him, too, make his peace, not just with her but himself. The man he knew he should have been.

A draining twenty minutes later, he was sitting on the floor beside her chair, his head leaning against her knee.

She stroked his hair, so soft yet as ever ruffled and unruly.

Suddenly, he shivered. “If Trentham hadn’t come…”

“If he hadn’t, you would have coped.”

After a moment, he sighed, then rubbed his cheek against her knee. “I suppose.”

She remained in bed for the rest of that day, too. By the next morning, she was feeling considerably better. The doctor called again, tested her vision and her balance, probed the tender spot on her skull, then pronounced himself satisfied.

“But I would advise you to avoid any activity that might exhaust you, at least for the next few days.”

She was considering that—considering the apology she had to make and how exhausting, mentally and physically, that was likely to be—as she slowly, carefully, went down the stairs.

Humphrey was sitting on a bench in the hall; using his cane, he slowly rose as she descended. He smiled, a little lopsidedly. “There you are, my dear. Feeling better?”

“Indeed. A great deal better, thank you.” She was tempted to launch into questions about the household, anything to avoid what she foresaw was to come. She put the urge from her as unworthy; Humphrey, like Harriet and Jeremy, needed to speak. Smiling easily, she accepted his arm when he offered it and steered him into the parlor.

The interview was worse—more emotionally involved—than she’d expected. They sat side by side on the chaise in the parlor, looking out over the gardens but seeing nothing of them. To her surprise, Humphrey’s guilt stretched back many more years than she’d realized.

He broached his recent shortcomings head-on, apologizing gruffly, but then he looked back, and she’d discovered he’d spent the last days thinking much more deeply than she’d guessed.

“I should have made Mildred come down to Kent more often—I knew it at the time.” Staring through the window, he absentmindedly patted Leonora’s hand. “You see, when your aunt Patricia died, I shut myself away—I swore I’d never care for anyone like that again, never leave myself open to so much hurt. I liked having you and Jeremy about the house—you were my distractions, my anchors to the daily round; with you two about, it was easy to forget my hurt and lead a normal enough life.

“But I was absolutely determined never to let any person get close, and become important to me. Not again. So I always kept myself distanced from you—from Jeremy, too, in many ways.” His old eyes weary, half-filled with tears, he turned to her. Smiled weakly, wryly. “And so I failed you, my dear, failed to take care of you as I ought, and I’m immensely ashamed of that. But I failed myself, too, in more ways than one. I cut myself off from what might have been between us, you and me, and with Jeremy, too. I shortchanged us all in that regard. But I still didn’t achieve what I wanted—I was too arrogant to see that caring about others is not wholly a conscious decision.”

His fingers tightened about hers. “When we found you lying on the flags that night…”

His voice quavered, died.

“Oh, Uncle.” Leonora raised her arms and hugged him. “It doesn’t matter. Not anymore.” She rested her head on his shoulder “It’s past.”

He hugged her back, but brusquely replied, “It does matter, but we won’t argue, because you’re right—it’s in the past. From now on, we go forward as we should have been.” He ducked his head to look into her face. “Eh?”

She smiled, a trifle teary herself. “Yes. Of course.”

“Good!” Humphrey released her and hauled in a breath. “Now—you must tell me all you and Trentham have discovered. I gather there’s some question about Cedric’s work?”

She explained. When Humphrey demanded to see Cedric’s journals she fetched a few from the stack in the corner.

“Hmm…humph!” Humphrey read down one page, then eyed the stack of journals. “How far have you got with these?”

“I’m only onto the fourth, but…” She explained that the journals were not filled in chronological order.

“He’ll have had some other order—a journal for each idea, for instance.” Humphrey shut the book on his lap. “No reason Jeremy and I can’t put our other work aside and give you a hand with these. Not your forte, but it is ours, after all.”

She managed not to gape. “But what about the Mesapotamians—and the Sumerians?”

The work they were both engaged in was a commission from the British Museum.

Humphrey snorted, waved the protest aside as he levered to his feet. “The museum can wait—this patently can’t. Not if some nefarious and dangerous bounder is after something here. Besides”—on his feet, he straightened and grinned at Leonora—“who else is the museum going to get to do such translations?”

An unarguable point. She rose and crossed to the bellpull. When Castor entered, she instructed him to move the stack of journals to the library. The journal he’d been looking at tucked under his arm, Humphrey shuffled out in that direction, Leonora assisting him; a footman carrying the journals passed them in the hall—they followed him into the library.

Jeremy looked up; as always open books covered his desk.

Humphrey waved his stick. “Clear a space. New task. Urgent matter.”

“Oh?”

To Leonora’s surprise, Jeremy obeyed, shutting books and moving them so the footman could set the towering stack of journals down.

Jeremy immediately took the top one and opened it. “What are they?”

Humphrey explained; Leonora added that they were assuming there was some valuable formula buried somewhere in the journals.

Already absorbed in the volume in his hands, Jeremy humphed.

Humphrey returned to his seat, and returned to the volume he’d carried from the parlor. Leonora considered, then left to check with the servants, and review all household matters.

An hour later, she reentered the library. Both Jeremy and Humphrey had their heads down; a frown was fixed on Jeremy’s face. He looked up when she lifted the top volume off the pile of journals.

“Oh.” He blinked somewhat myopically at her.

She sensed his instinctive wish to take the book back. “I thought I’d help.”

Jeremy colored, glanced at Humphrey. “Actually, it’s not going to be easy to do that, not unless you can stay here most of the day.”

She frowned. “Why?”

“It’s the cross-referencing. We’ve only just made a start, but it’s going to be a nightmare until we discover the connection between the journals, and their correct sequence, too. We’ll have to do it verbally—it’s simply too big a job, and we need the answer too urgently, to attempt to write down connections.” He looked at her. “We’re used to it. If there are other avenues that need to be investigated, you might be better employed—we might get this mystery solved sooner if you gave your attention to them.”

Neither wanted to exclude her; it was there in their eyes, in their earnest expressions. But Jeremy spoke the truth; they were the experts in this field—and she really did not fancy spending the rest of the day and the evening, too, squinting at Cedric’s wavering script.

And there were numerous other matters on her plate.

She smiled benignly. “There are other avenues it would be worthwhile exploring, if you can cope without me?”

“Oh, yes.”

“We’ll manage.”

Her smile widened. “Good, then I’ll leave you to it.”

Turning, she went to the door. Glancing back as she turned the knob, she saw both heads down again. Still smiling, she left.

And determinedly turned her mind to her most urgent task: tending to her wounded wolf.






Chapter Fifteen

Accomplishing that goal—making her peace with Tristan—arranging to do so, required a degree of ingenuity and bold-faced recklessness she’d never before had to employ. But she had no choice. She summoned Gasthorpe, boldly gave him orders, arranged to hire a carriage and be conveyed to the mews behind Green Street, the coachman to wait for her return.

All, of course, with the firm insistence that under no circumstances was his-lordship-the-earl to be informed. She’d discovered a ready intelligence in Gasthorpe; although she hadn’t liked subverting him from his loyalty to Tristan, when all was said and done, it was for Tristan’s own good.

When, in the darkness of late evening, she stood in the bushes at the end of Tristan’s garden and saw light shining from the windows of his study, she felt vindicated in every respect.

He hadn’t gone out to any ball or dinner. Given her absence from the ton, the fact that he, too, wasn’t attending the usual events would be generating intense speculation. Following the path through the bushes and farther to where it skirted the house, she wondered how immediate he would wish their wedding to be. For herself, having made her decision, she didn’t truly care…or, if she did, she would rather it was sooner than later.

Less time to anticipate how things would work out—much better to take the plunge and get straight on with it.

Her lips lifted. She suspected he would share that opinion, if not for quite the same reasons.

Pausing outside the study, she stood on tiptoe and peeked in; the floor was considerably higher than the ground. Tristan was seated at his desk, his back to her, his head bent as he worked. A pile of papers sat on his right; on his left, a ledger lay open.